My favorite new show of the season is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. It is crisp, rich, clever, and smart. Aaron Sorkin is a brilliant writer and producer who always tells compelling stories and presents multi-dimensional magnetic characters.

However, Sorkin is an artist with a political edge. In the midst of his artistry is always the message. Message is okay. Art is the product of creative people communicating messages to wider audiences. But sometimes the message overpowers the art.

My beef with Sorkin in the past has been that he perverts the facts to make a better case for his political points. For example, in aid of his mission to defend Bill Clinton, he and Rob Reiner made a movie entitled The American President. Incensed that mean-spirited Republicans criticized President Clinton's sex-life as a way to attack his politics, Sorkin created a fictional Democratic president, Andrew Shepherd, a widowed dad morally upright in every way. President Shepherd falls in love with a beautiful idealistic liberal lobbyist. When they start dating, the despicable Republicans pounce on them for having sex out of wedlock and other harmless revelations from her distant past. Oooooohhhhhh! Why are Republicans so mean?

My objection then: if you are going to defend Bill Clinton, then do it honestly. Make the fictional President a philanderer. Figure out how to make the betrayed wife unsympathetic and the tryst with the intern in the Oval Office an honorable encounter.

I stayed away from the West Wing (aka the Left Wing) for similar qualms.

But Studio 60 has been surprisingly subtle in the message department thus far and pleasantly packed full of great entertainment. But then tonight happened. Sorkin created a ridiculous storyline to shame the FCC for their crackdown on profane speech. Instead of featuring a rock star who shouts the f-word on live TV or two rock stars who stage a sexual assault during the halftime show at the Super Bowl, Sorkin created an incident in which a soldier in Afghanistan under attack ejaculates the f-word on a live news broadcast. The reaction of the FCC? A heartless multi-million dollar fine and the threat of extinction.

Oooooohhhhhh! Why are Republicans so mean?